Dr May L-Y Wong

Contact details

Tel: (852) 2859 2758

Email: maylywong at hku dot hk

Room: MB245B, Main Building

Assistant Professor

Degree: BA (HKU), M Phil (HKU), PhD (Lancaster)

 

School of Humanities

University of Hong Kong

Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong

 

 

Current Teaching

This year, my undergraduate teaching includes the following:

¡´ Course lecturer and seminar tutor on LING2024 Lexicology and Lexicography

¡´ Course lecturer and seminar tutor on LING2025 Corpus Linguistics

In previous years I have also taught on conversation analysis, phonology, and introduction to linguistics.

My postgraduate teaching includes the MA module in Data-driven Linguistic Analysis and the Corpus Linguistics module in Current Issues in Linguistics and Research Methods in Linguistics. I also supervise a number of MA students.

Research Interests

My research interests focus on using corpora to address Chinese and English grammar as it relates to theory, language description and second language acquisition. Recently I have shown an interest in Hong Kong English, a localised variety of English rooted in Hong Kong. I also research into English language teaching in secondary school context.

 

 My particular research interests currently include:

¡´ quantitative approaches to Chinese grammar;

¡´ Chinese-English/English-Chinese parallel texts and the theory of translation and language teaching;

¡´ structural features of English in Hong Kong;

¡´ keyness and frequency phenomena in texts;

¡´ language teaching and learning in Hong Kong (with particular regard to data-driven learning).

Publications

¡´ 2009. Gei constructions in Mandarin Chinese and bei constructions in Cantonese: A corpus-driven contrastive study. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (1): 60-80.

¡´ 2007. Tag questions in Hong Kong English: A corpus-based study. Asian Englishes 10 (1): 44-61.

¡´ 2006. Corpora and intuition: A study of Mandarin Chinese adverbial clauses and subjecthood. Corpora: Corpus-based Language Learning, Language Processing and Linguistics 1 (2): 187-216. DOI: 10.3366/cor.2006.1.2.187

¡´ 2006. Review of Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao and Yukio Tono, Corpus-based language studies: an advanced resource book. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11 (4): 506-509.

¡´ 2006. On the sequential ordering of adverbs in Mandarin Chinese. Acta Orientalia 2006 (67): 325-353.

¡´ 2006. Skeleton parsing in Chinese: Annotation scheme and guidelines. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006), 1815-1820. France: Evaluations and Language Resources Distribution Agency.

¡´ 2005. The compilation of a sample PFR Chinese corpus of skeleton-parsed sentences. A new relay on linguistics (International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology, ASJU special volume of the Proceedings of the Bilbao-Deusto Student Conference in Linguistics 2004), ed. Asier Alcˆhzar, Irene Barberia, Rebeca Campos-Astorkiza and Susana Huidobro, 271-287. San Sebastian, Spain: University of the Basque Country Press.

¡´ 2005. Choice or informed opinion? A critical social semiotic approach to Dove¡¦s magazine advertisement. Manuscript.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I would be especially interested in supervising PhD candidates working in the following areas:

¡´ corpora of English, Chinese and other languages of East Asia;

¡´ corpus-based phraseological/grammatical analysis, especially cross-linguistic and/or quantitative approaches to lexicogrammar;

¡´ investigating language using statistical collocations;

¡´ the exploitation of corpus methods and resources in second language acquisition;

¡´ or, more generally, in any area coherent with my research interests.